The agency said the speaker of the lower chamber of the Czech parliament, Vaclav Klaus, announced Benda’s death at the beginning of today’s parliament’s session. Benda was a member of Klaus’s Civic Democratic Party.

Benda, a signatory of the Charter 77 human rights movement, spent four years in communist jails.

After the 1989 peaceful revolution that toppled the communist regime, Benda became a deputy in the then-Czechoslovak parliament and later headed a newly established institute investigating crimes of the former communist nomenclature.

He was elected to the upper chamber of the Czech parliament, the Senate, in 1996.